A Deeply Thoughtful and Moving Suor Angelica at the London Coliseum

Giacomo Puccini’s Il trittico, which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1918, is a triptych of one-act operas comprising Il tabarro, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi. The composer originally intended for each opera to reflect one part of Dante’s Divina Commedia, although in the event only the final work is based on the poem. As a result, the only theme that really underpins the operas is that they all involve, in one way or another, the concealment of a...

As the year commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Dmitri Shostakovich's death approaches, smart theatres are preparing new productions of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, the composer's second, last and most famous opera, with the idea of renting it out to other theatres and thus recouping their investment. Beyond its many musical and dramatic merits, this opera, one of the finest of the 20th century, is - unfortunately - known for the fact that Stalin disliked it and...

Piotr Tchaïkovski’s Eugene Onegin, which premiered in Moscow in 1879, is based on Alexander Pushkin’s eponymous verse poem. The libretto, which was organised by the composer himself, closely follows certain passages in its source material and retains much of the poetry. Set in the 1820s in and around St Petersburg, it sees Tatyana, the daughter of landowner Madame Larina, fall in love with one Eugene Onegin. She is introduced to him when her sister Olga’s...

Based on Victorien Sardou’s 1887 French-language play, Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca of 1900, with a libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, not only occurs in a specific time and place, but on a precise date that can be linked to an historical event. All of the action takes place during the afternoon, evening and early morning of 17 and 18 June 1800, following the Battle of Marengo between Napoleon’s army and Austrian forces. The Austrians were initially...

Adriana Lecouvreur has returned to the Liceu, a title that is an authentic operone, with a great vocal score and an orchestration of high level and full of details; a very great drama, with four acts, ballet, three imposing characters and an intense dramatic conflict on a libretto with no special poetic relevance. A work with a very rare aesthetic situation given that, ascribed by the time of composition (it was premiered in 1902) to verismo, it is not about screams and stabbings...

La Cenerentola, even more than Il Barbiere di Siviglia, is the true encyclopaedia of Rossinian singing which, in a barbarically summarized form, could be defined as a singing that must be easy, fluid, light, but in no way inconsistent; a line full of high notes to which the interpreter should never arrive puffing, exhausted, strangled and at the limit of their strength after a risky climb, but should fly over it elegantly and lightly, taking advantage of the fact that Rossini never forces...